Caterham chase progress

8 April 2013

After enduring two difficult races in Australia and Malaysia, the Caterham F1 team is seeking to make progress at this weekend's Chinese Grand Prix.

Charles Pic, who took part in his first Chinese Grand Prix last season, said the main focus for Caterham will be trying to correct the handling issues that blighted its cars in the previous two events.

“On Friday and Saturday morning we'll also be working on several performance areas that the team has been looking at since Malaysia,' he said, "particularly around dialling out the understeer issues I had in Australia and Malaysia.”

Pic however, went on to praise the circuit's overtaking opportunities and easy nature on brakes.

“Last year was my first race in China and I thought the track was pretty good," he said. "The lap starts with a very long straight with a tight right-hander at the end which is a natural place to overtake right at the start of the lap.

"One area we will focus on in the practice sessions is making sure the car's very stable under braking so I can attack into each braking zone – you need that and very good traction out of the slower corners to push the cars ahead around the whole lap.”

Giedo van der Garde echoed his team-mates' comments on handling and expects to have any issues sorted with the CT03 car before qualifying and the race on Sunday.

“One thing we are going to be focusing on in China is work on improving our setup options for qualifying, using the practice sessions to give us as many options as possible for the race but also for quali,” said the Dutchman who is making his Chinese Grand Prix race debut this weekend.

“I didn't have the car behaving exactly as I'd like in either Australia or Malaysia so I want to get that right in China.”